News broke Wednesday about Microsoft adding support for Git to Visual Studio, both in the client -- so that it can be used to work against any Git DVCS (distributed version control system) such as Gitorious or GitHub -- and on the server. The upshot is twofold: Those using Microsoft's proprietary centralized version control have a new escape route, and GitHub has a new competitor.

For me, the really interesting dimensions of this news were not so much about Microsoft's embrace of distributed version control, which is a simple matter of market forces, but rather what support for Git says about Microsoft and open source.

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